Legislation

About: Legislation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 62664 publications have been published within this topic receiving 585188 citations. The topic is also known as: law & act.

Securing Land Rights in Africa

Abstract: This collection of research papers from across the African continent illustrates the complex and ever-changing rules of the land tenure game, and how government legislation and reform (formalization) interact with local innovations (informalization) to form land tenure systems.

White-Collar Crime and Social Structure

Abstract: The major theoretical significance of white-collar crime lies in its ambiguity as simultaneously crime and not crime. This is symptomatic of a diversity of status systems peculiar to the social structure. Research can begin with the ambivalent attitudes of individuals to white-collar offenses and to the laws against them. A Norwegian study revaled in businessmen a strikingly ambivalent attitude to price control and rationing and to violations of the regulations. Another study showed ambivalent attitudes on labor legislation among legislators. The function of law is to preserve peace in the face of these conflicts.

Democratic Delusions: The Initiative Process in America

Abstract: It is becoming common in many states: the opportunity to reclaim government from politicians by simply signing a petition to put an initiative on the ballot and then voting for it. Isn't this what America ought to be about? Proposition 13 in California's 1978 election paved the way; the past decade saw more than 450 such actions; now in many states direct legislation dominates the political agenda and defines political and public-opinion. While this may appear to be democracy in action, Richard Ellis warns us that the initiative process may be putting democracy at risk. In "Democratic Delusions" he offers a critical analysis of the statewide initiative process in the United States, challenging readers to look beyond populist rhetoric and face political reality. Through engaging prose and illuminating (and often amusing) anecdotes, Ellis shows readers the "dark side" of direct democracy specifically the undemocratic consequences that result from relying too heavily on the initiative process. He provides historic context to the development of initiatives-from their Populist and Progress roots to their accelerated use in recent decades-and shows the differences between initiative processes in the states that use them. Most important, while acknowledging the positive contribution of initiatives, Ellis shows that there are reasons to use them carefully and sparingly: ill-considered initiatives can subvert normal legislative checks and balances, undermine the deliberative process, and even threaten the rights of minority groups through state-sanctioned measures. Today's initiative process, Ellis warns, is dominated not by ordinary citizens but by politicians, perennial activists, wealthy interests, and well-oiled machines. Deliberately misleading language on the ballot confuses voters and influences election results. And because many initiatives are challenged in the courts, these ostensibly democratic procedures have now put legislation in the hands of the judiciary. Throughout his book he cites examples drawn from states in which initiatives are used intensively Oregon, California, Colorado, Washington, and Arizona-as well as others in which their use has increased in recent years. Undoing mistakes enacted by initiative can be more difficult than correcting errors of legislatures. As voters prepare to consider the host of initiatives that will be offered in the 2002 elections, this book can help put those efforts in a clearer light. "Democratic Delusions" urges moderation, attempting to teach citizens to be at least as skeptical of the initiative process as they are of the legislative process and to appreciate the enduring value of the representative institutions they seek to circumvent."

Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England

Abstract: During the f1rst half of the nineteenth century, an increasing proportion of the working population was employed as factory labor. Factories and workshops were growing larger. At the same time the nature of farm labor changed as the yearly hiring was gradually replaced by a more casual monthly contract and young, unmarried farm servants no longer lived in their employer's household. Integral to this fundamental change to a more limited contract, was the long and sometimes savage conflict over the abolishing of the Law of Master and Servant and its replacement by the Employer and Workman Act of 1875.1 At about the same time, there began a very gradual shift in the conception of the married woman's relationship to society (a process that is by no means complete even now), a move to make marriage a contract, voidable like other contracts involving two legal personalities.2 This basic change, too, was reflected in some of the legislation that made inroads into the ancient common law concept of couveture: "the husband and wife are one and the husband is that one," Blackstone. Despite all the political and social ferment these changes generated, the impassioned debates in Parliament and in the press, there were two groups who, almost unnoticed, were hardly touched by the new order. Domestic servants and working-class married women continued, up to the First World War and beyond, in their pre-industrial, almost 13iblical, subordination to their masters and husbands. Regulation by Factory and Workshops Acts, Trades Boards or investigations into sweated labor passed them by. Trade Union organization proved to be unworkable for servants, untllinkable for wives. Insurance schemes left them aside. Enfranchisement was not for them for they had neither domicile nor property of their own. Their legal definition and, in signiElcant ways, their real situation was closer to the age-old common law doctrine of potestas: children, wives and servants are under the protection and wing of the Master.3 He is the intermediary to the

South African higher education in the first decade of democracy: from cooperative governance to conditional autonomy

Abstract: This paper tracks policies in the governance of higher education over the first decade of South Africa’s democracy. The first democratically elected government of 1994 was faced with the formidable task of dismantling the structures of apartheid education. The foundations for a new policy were laid by a National Commission that reported in 1996, and advocated a philosophy of ‘cooperative governance’ by a wide range of stakeholders. However, the government’s formal policy, articulated in a White Paper and legislation the following year, established a more directive role for the state. Successive amendments to the legislation culminated in a National Plan for Higher Education in which the state plays a strongly directive role, and seeks to recast the higher education landscape through extensive incorporations and mergers. While there is a strong case for state steering of public education in a country such as South Africa, where urgent attention to key issues of economic development and social justice is es...